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Collector Amanda Precourt Skipped the Vanity Museum to Give Denver a Community Art Space

With Cookie Factory, she's building an alternative legacy centered not on financial value or personal aggrandizement but on emotional connection, accessibility and community.

Arts foundations and private museums are frequently ego projects, well-intentioned but there to showcase the breadth of the founder’s collection and build a legacy around their name. Denver-based collector and real estate developer Amanda Precourt could have gone that route but wanted to take a different approach that placed art’s impact on her local community at the center. From her vision, Cookie Factory emerged—a free-to-the-public art space that launched in May 2025 and has since become a hub for the city’s creative community.

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Housed in a former fortune cookie factory in the Baker neighborhood, Cookie Factory has a 5,000-square-foot gallery, a sculpture garden and video-screening rooms that host temporary exhibitions—mostly produced specifically for the venue—and an extensive public program. Precourt lives and displays her own collection on the residential floor above the galleries. “Rooted in place and embedded within a residential enclave, we operate on an intimate, human scale,” reads the space’s website, neatly summarizing its ethos.

When we meet Precourt at the St. Regis Aspen, it is clear that her highly sensitive and receptive nature has guided both her collecting and, later, the vision she developed for the space. Having just driven from Denver to attend the Aspen Museum Art Crush Gala, her blue eyes shine as she shares the story behind her ambitious adaptive-reuse project and community-focused art initiative.

Precourt, who is a real estate developer and designer by trade, discovered the factory after its roof had collapsed and the building had flooded—after more than 65 years, the owners simply wanted to sell. Paper fortunes were still floating in several inches of water among the old machinery, but she sensed the site’s potential and decided to follow her instincts. “When we pulled up to it, I literally got chills,” she tells Observer. “Sometimes it’s an imprinting. You feel energies or something.”

Precourt has always loved finding old buildings and adapting them for reuse while preserving their original identity. At the time, she had been casually looking for spaces where she and her husband, an artist, might create something art-related, but she did not yet have a clear sense of what such a project might look like. Discovering the factory immediately crystallized the vision in her mind: opening up the single-story structure to create an art space below with a residence above.

The project developed organically, but Precourt understood from the outset that it should be art-forward, noncommercial and oriented toward Denver rather than simply serving as a display space for her private collection. “I wanted to do something art-forward, but for the community,” she says, noting that through the long process of conversion and renovation, the building and her vision for it began to inform the way she collected.

Although she did not grow up in a particularly culturally minded family, art has been central to Precourt’s life since childhood. She recalls drawing and painting from a young age, and during adolescence, the practice became a tool for managing anxiety: “It is a way to reduce the external chaos by bringing in internal calm. I was always drawing and painting, and I drew and painted through college. I always felt art was something in my blood, although I never became a professional artist.”

Precourt began buying work by regional and local artists in her thirties while studying real estate finance, developing properties and designing houses. At the time, she primarily followed her own taste and did not initially identify as a collector. “I was not thinking ‘I’m building a........

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